Crikey – Take A Look At Miasmata

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Having successfully fought its way through the Greenlight lion pit, Miasmata is a first-person survival game, created by just two guys – brothers Joe and Bob Johnson (under the silly name of IonFx. Eyeonphnx?). And when they say created, they really mean it. This game in which you must survive on an island, pursued by only one strange creature, has been built from scratch. Take a look at the superb graphics in the trailer below, and then be somewhat amazed that they built the engine too.

I think so much of whether this will work out depends on whether they can make that absolutely intriguing idea – just one enemy – be compelling. As amazing as seeing those lovely squirrels may be.

You’ll be playing as Robert Hughes, infected with a plague and searching for a cure on an island rather unoriginally called Eden. The island was formerly inhabited, and remnants of their civilisation remain, and now features a scientific research outpost. But attempting to rejoin your colleagues, you’ll not be too surprised to learn stuff’s gone wrong.

So it’s open, an island you can explore as you wish, all the while doing your best to avoid a creature that wants to kill you. Because you know what you’re like. It’s capable of stalking you for miles, they say, using what will hopefully be impressive AI and a multitude of senses to keep on your tail. But you’re motivated to keep exploring by the desire to discover a plant that could cure you of your lurgy.

The idea pokes me directly in my want gland – careful, meticulous survival, but with a very specific threat, rather than everything everywhere trying to kill me all the time. But right now I don’t have the faintest idea if it’ll work. There’s still three weeks to wait to find out, with the game due out on the 28th November.

Actually looked more like the arrow keys were being used in place of mouse look. Imagine using WASD for back / forward etc, but looking around is the arrow keys, like back in the days when games had only just been invented and ID software hadn’t figured out how to plug a mouse in yet. Even gamepads are smoother than that.

They commented to say that they were indeed controlling it with a gamepad, as using a keyboard and mouse caused the video to stutter with the specific technique they used to record the footage; the game itself is built for the keyboard and mouse. Odd, but there you have it.

It’s a bit odd how some things look AMAZING and then other things look really awkwardly out of place, like those silent clunky seagull animations – of course it is a miraculous feat that they managed to make the engine at all though

Gosh that looks impressive. And it seems like there are puzzle/investigation elements as well — kind of Myst meets Far Cry.

One criticism, though: was the creature seen about half-way through the trailer the monster that is hunting you? If so, for goodness sake, don’t show the monster!

This looks like a classic case where the atmosphere will be so much more effective if the monster remains an implied rather than direct threat for as long as you can get away with. It can’t be that complicated to code its behaviour so that it moves out of view or hides as you turn to look at it (or whatever). I really hope they think about it.

At 0:41 – Looks like it’s going to suffer from the “gather X, Y and Z ingredients and use the cure-o-tron 4000 to create the remedy” plague. With today’s technology, we can afford something a bit more elaborate than that such as realistic lab equipment to extract, synthesize and mix components, even an animal testing session. This could add some interesting gameplay elements (using natural resources to create realistically a makeshift solvent, cultivating cells in a right environment, repairing equipment) instead of looking goofy.

Suspension of disbelief and all that, but I really think we can do more interesting things today. Hope it’s not a central element to the game.

Good point, though. Suspension of belief is increasingly more difficult, and few single-player games have any sort of sophisticated ideas informing their existence (though The Void). The trailer shows a gather all the stars to get a power-up mechanic, while the “monster” looks a bit Nintendo-scary, but it looks promising and I’m sure it will have an audience nonetheless.

The single antagonist worked for Slender and Amnesia, though both of those are humanoid (which imo is more frightening as it implies the possible human motivations, not just being nom nomy) and they also hide the villian from view a lot.

If another plague victim was stalking, tracking you for the cure than that would be interesting.

Also I love the idea mentioned above of having to do your own clinical trials, maybe on the squirrel or rats .

I so want this game! :D
I like the idea of just one enemy. It’ll give you much more time to actually appreciate the scenery instead of missing it because you have to keep an eye out for enemies the whole time.
I think I may have seen this game on my list in Greenlight but I skipped over it. Turns out you shouldn’t judge a game by its Greenlight thumbnail.

There was a game prototype posted perhaps a year ago that reminds me quite heavily of this. It had you scavenging and chopping vegetables and putting red flower specimens you’d found in nature into strange pressing machines. And something about a robotic lady you were rebuilding? Am I crazy?

You are not crazy (well, not in this respect at least). I forget the name, but I know the game you mean. In the game, you live in a yurt. Maybe near a partly built/ruined theme park. The more I think about it, maybe we’re both crazy?

To what extent does being stalked by an enemy you can’t defeat directly work against exploration gameplay?

One of the reasons I didn’t try FTL was the description given here at RPS. Apparently there’s a Rebel fleet that’s pursuing you. From the sound of it (especially in the late game), you have to weigh looking for resources against the risk of being caught by the Rebel fleet.

That risk, as a deliberate design emphasis, sends the message that “we don’t really want you exploring this world — better get to the exit!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; certainly it makes for tense gameplay if you care about winning. But it’s not pro-exploration.

A similar argument applies to “real-time strategy” games, in which the real-time part breaks any strategic fun by constantly interrupting the thoughtful concentration necessary to perceive patterns and explore strategic possibilities. For that matter, timed games like Scramble With Friends and speed-up arcade-style games like Tetris also penalize exploratory play.

Which brings me back to Miasmata. Is exploration under time pressure, where you never know if you’re about to be jumped by something that can insta-kill you, as much fun for someone who enjoys exploration play as a game that doesn’t have that kind of uncontrollable challenge?

FTL isn’t open-world or exploration focused, it is a linear RL with a very clear and precise goal, so I’m confused as to what you picture the game as in your head. The FTL diary was misleading, I suppose.

FTL isn’t open-world or exploration focused, I agree. But it does have what appears to be opportunities for exploration — there are places you can consider going when you enter a new sector.

What I find odd about that is, at the same time that the game shows you places you might explore, it also warns you that if you do go exploring, the Rebel fleet might get you. That’s not pure evil as game design goes; it’s setting up risk-based choices.

What I’m pointing out is that this kind of choice discourages exploration as a playstyle. That shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of FTL, since it’s obviously not meant to be “an exploration game.” It’s simply an observation that FTL is an example of a game with some exploration content that then discourages exploration of that content.

And the point of that observation is to highlight the thought that Miasmata is doing something similar. It sounds like it’s creating an interesting world to explore, then basically discouraging you from doing so because the big bad monster might get you.

Again, that’s not necessarily a general flaw. Maybe it’s that way by design.

But for someone who particularly enjoys exploration in games, that kind of “look but don’t touch” thing is a bit of a tease — more frustrating than pleasurable.